Your daughter's style

How do you enforce standards of dress at your home and yet still let your daughters find their own styles?  I have seen a whole family of homeschool girls apparently in uniform and, if they are happy with that, of course, there is no problem.  But, if your daughter is not comfortable or feels badly in the clothes you want her to wear, it could affect her negatively for years.  So could not having standards in dress, so we will address both of these.


When I was little, I always wanted to go look at the fluffy, fru-fru dresses.  My mother wouldn't darken the door of that department.  She hated shopping, so I only went shopping once a year for my school clothes and it  became a battle of her practicality in opposition to my feminine longings.  We have since discovered that her style is sporty/natural and my style is romantic. So, when I wanted ruffled dresses, I ended up with herringbone tweed jumpers with gigungous flat buttons for decoration.  Yay.  By the time I was eleven, she would get a whole pile of clothes to the dressing room and go through them saying, "Do you like this?"  I wouldn't exactly say yes or no, but I knew she would not allow me to get something I would like, so I said, "If it is in my closet, I'll wear it."  I had come to the conclusion that my opinion didn't matter, so we both got frustrated with her attempts to elicit one.  It wasn't until I was 38 and, ironically enough, moved into a house with my mother that I discovered my style.


The house is theirs, but divided distinctly, with two of everything.  For the first time, I thought I would be in a house long enough to actually decorate it beyond hand-me-down furniture, so I asked my mother for some of her decorating books.  We live in the same county as Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio, Taliesin, and our house was designed with the Prairie Style in mind.  Think Mission furniture and Morris as a decorator.  Arts and Crafts.  Well, I looked at her books and, as lovely and warm as all these rooms were, they left me cold.  They were dark, (though our house has heaps of windows and maple flooring), lots of geometric florals and sharp cornered furniture.  Very masculine.  Things began to percolate for me, however, and I realized that the Arts and Crafts movement took place in the Victorian Age.  So, I looked at Victorian and Romantic Country style magazines and fell in love.  And when I discovered how I wantee d a house to look, I discovered how I wanted me to look. 


My mother wears tweed pants; I wear flowy cotton skirts.  Her dining room table is rectangular; mine is oval.  Her chairs (even the sofa) have rectangular backs and corners; I have overstuffed furniture and rounded chair backs.  Her floral patterns are geometric; mine are natural.  I was finally a grown-up, making my own choices!


So, how do you let your daughter make her own choices while still upholding your standards?    


We had planned that our daughters would all wear skirts: Steve likes femininity.  However, I have seen some very frumpy ladies who would swear they are dressing femininely.  Lets look at Proverbs 31:22: "She makes tapestry for herself; Her clothing is fine linen and purple."  The Bible says she dresses well.  It doesn't mean it has to be fancy or designer - she made it herself - but she is not a frump.  Her style should be modest, but flattering.  For us, modest means no cleavage and no knees and clothes that are loose enough to not stretch on the body. Clothing that is figure-unflattering can draw just  as much attention and be as bad a witness to the Christian life as clothing that is entirely too flattering, shall we say.  Our change of thought on the sksirts business, however, occurred when our oldest daughter, Becki, was 8. 


Becki was very active, loved to play with the boys, since she had two older brothers, but wasn't comfortable playing boy games in dresses.  I can appreciate that, since, at that age, I wore shorts under my (polyester tweed!) skirts to play tag on the monkey bars with the boys.  So, she wore sweatpants for the next three years.  Everywhere.  Even church.  She had dresses for really nice occasions, but we didn't have many of those.  Her challenge was that she has always been a big girl.  She was always taller going into an age (say, 8) than the people turning out of it (becoming 9).  So, by the time she was was 11 or 12 and decided she wanted to look nice, she was already in junior sizes.  By the age of 13, she was wearing women's size 12.  She wanted to be able to wear the cute girl dresses, which actually were age appropriate for her, but none of the clothes available to her were like that.  We made a dress or two, but it was mostly letting her dabble with skirts and dress pants, jackets and different styles of blouses and shoes, that she finally found her style.  She is still a big girl and she has to try everything on, but we have found her comfortable, everyday style, which is mid-rise pants, a polo with a tank top (for modesty, as well as style) and often a necklace to divide her chest and make it appear smaller. Remember, she's a BIG girl.  She has also discovered that she can wear snazzy shoes that add to her height and give her a more feminine walk, even when  she is wearing jeans.  She is sixteen, so high heels are acceptable in our opinion.  


Sarah is 14.  She prefers skirts, but will wear pants and is rather artsy at heart.  She draws, paints, dances ballet, and came into her own about the time that women friends of ours started handing down their grown-up clothes to us.  Becki will sometimes avail herself of the hand-me-down bags, but Sarah revels in them.  She covers her head, either with bandana or an artistic hat, and loves long skirts.  She is slighter than Becki and shorter, so she doesn't have a problem being fit.  Her favorite outfit is a brown tiered skirt, an Israeli Defense Force camo t-shirt and a green or tan scarf for a belt.  She's modest, it's flattering, can't complain.


Gabrielle is 12.  She wants to live like Laura Ingalls.  She only wears pants when she is cleaning out the barn in the winter or when she hunts with her older brother, or when she plays the trombone in marching band.  For her, it is dresses, only dresses, not skirts.  She covers her head, but only with bandanas or scarves and has made herself a pair of Duck Tape sandals (thank you, Mythbusters!) to replace the $70 Tevas she left at the water park.  (That hurt!)  Since she truly wants to homestead (completely conceivable as a future career where we live) and would rather have a horse and wagon than a driver's license, the dresses work very well for her.  


Miriam is 10 and only happy when she is moving.  Literally.  She starts to cry when she has to be still for too long.  She is also a ballet dancer, but considers that far too controlled to be really fun.  Jeans are her speed.  However, she, like Becki, is also a big girl, and the challenge for her is allowing her to wear jeans and t-shirts that are bigger, so they are not too tight (one of standards, remember?)  I sometimes have to sneak clothes out of her laundry pile when I know they are getting too small.  She's not happy about it, but she doesn't realize they're gone til it's too late.  She says she prefers them snug, and I am not really surprised by that.  She is extremely tactile, as one might imagine from my description of her, and the tight clothes may actually be more comfortable for her.  However, they are not flattering, showing her bumps and rolls.  So, we, as parents, have had to work with her style (jeans and shirts and boots) while setting standards (not too tight!)